Abstract
Trust between a patient and a medical doctor is normally both justified and taken for granted, but sometimes it may need to be negotiated. In this paper I will present how trust can be interpreted as both an explicit and implicit phenomenon, drawing on literature from the social sciences and philosophy. The distinction between explicit and implicit interpretations of trust will be used to address problems that may arise in clinical consultations. Negotiating trust in any way very easily brings distrust into a situation, but sometimes this can be helpful for building a more functional patient-doctor relationship.
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Acknowledgements
I am very thankful for the support and friendly advice I have received from professor Arnstein Finset at the University of Oslo when writing this paper. Others who deserve thanks for commenting previous versions of this paper are professors Lars Hertzberg at Åbo Akademi University, Gunnar Skirbekk at the University of Bergen and Harald Grimen at Oslo University College.
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Skirbekk, H. Negotiated or taken-for-granted trust? Explicit and implicit interpretations of trust in a medical setting. Med Health Care and Philos 12, 3–7 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11019-008-9142-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11019-008-9142-2